The Duel: Bilingual Edition (English – Russian)

Summary

Instead of memorizing vocabulary words, work your way through an actual well-written novel. Even novices can follow along as each individual English paragraph is paired with the corresponding Russian paragraph. It won't be an easy project, but you'll learn a lot.

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The Duel - Anton Chekhov

Garnett

I

I

It was eight o'clock in the morning — the time when the officers, the local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the army doctor.

With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after making his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily good-natured, kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use.

He was on familiar terms with every one in the town, lent every one money, doctored every one, made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked shashlik and an awfully good soup of grey mullets. He was always looking after other people's affairs and trying to interest some one on their behalf, and was always delighted about something.

The general opinion about him was that he was without faults of character. He had only two weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise it by a surly expression and an assumed gruffness; and he liked his assistants and his soldiers to call him «Your Excellency,» although he was only a civil councillor.

«Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch,» Laevsky began, when both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders. «Suppose you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel that you had nothing in common with her.

Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And how would you do it?»

Неужели ты решился бы предложить ей деньги? И в какой форме?

Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the shingle. The friends got out and began dressing.

«Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don't love her,» said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. «But one must look at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.»

He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said:

«But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go to the devil!»

The friends dressed and went into the pavilion. There Samoylenko was quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer. Every morning they brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water, and a tiny glass of brandy. He would first drink the brandy, then the hot coffee, then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for after drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke his whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea:

After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no better for the bathe and the coffee.

«Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch,» he said. «I won't make a secret of it; I'll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in a bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me... a very bad way! Forgive me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out.»

It was Laevsky's habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did so now.

«I know very well you can't help me,» he said. «But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types — in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on.

Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true! ' And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!»

Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:

«Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature.»

We really ran away from her husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter the service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on.

If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society;

if you go out into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and beyond the fields — mountains and the desert. Alien people, an alien country, a wretched form of civilisation — all that is not so easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one's fur coat, arm-in-arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South. What is needed here is a life and death struggle, and I'm not a fighting man.

From the first day I knew that my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless. As for love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception.»

«You can't get on in the house without an iron,» said Samoylenko, blushing at Laevsky's speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew.

Of course, you are not married,» Samoylenko went on, glancing round at the adjacent tables, «but that's not your fault; and besides... one ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level of modern ideas. I believe in free love myself, yes.... But to my thinking, once you have settled together, you ought to go on living together all your life.»

«Eight years ago there was an old fellow, an agent, here — a man of very great intelligence. Well, he used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your patience....»

Your old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen so low. If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells or a frisky horse, but I'll leave human beings alone.»

Samoylenko asked for some white wine with ice. When they had drunk a glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:

«Tell me, please, what is the meaning of softening of the brain?»

«How can I explain it to you?... It's a disease in which the brain becomes softer... as it were, dissolves.»

While I'm with you I can be philosophical about it and smile, but at home I lose heart completely; I am so utterly miserable, that if I were told, for instance, that I should have to live another month with her, I should blow out my brains. At the same time, parting with her is out of the question. She has no friends or relations; she cannot work, and neither she nor I have any money.... What could become of her? To whom could she go? There is nothing one can think of.... Come, tell me, what am I to do?»

To the pines and the mushrooms, to people and ideas.... I'd give half my life to bathe now in some little stream in the province of Moscow or Tula; to feel chilly, you know, and then to stroll for three hours even with the feeblest student, and to talk and talk endlessly.... And the scent of the hay! Do you remember it? And in the evening, when one walks in the garden, sounds of the piano